Tag: home school

Categories
Home Education

Lockdown Schooling

Contents of Box

As the UK returns to Lockdown, I know many parents are frustrated and concerned about returning to Lockdown Schooling. And, many teachers and schools are frustrated and concerned at having to provide distance learning with no time to prepare.

Online learning had its place, but I think we all agree that it’s not a good idea to sit children in front of a computer all day long!

Hands on learning allows children to explore ideas and to learn through play. Gameschooling makes learning fun and reduces the stress caused in many households when parents are forced to adopt the role of Teacher.

The Frogotter Box is an all inclusive curriculum linked set of resources, ready to use with no preparation at all.

No Preparation Required

Because it requires no preparation, parents and carers don’t need to spend any time searching the internet for ideas, gathering materials, or printing worksheets. You can just open the box and begin. It’s the most efficient use of what little time you can make available to teach – especially handy if you’re combining Home Schooling with Working From Home!

National Curriculum Linked

Because it’s curriculum linked, you can rest assured that it will build on what your children have learnt at school – increasing their confidence. And it will prepare them for returning to school when all this is over. This may be particularly helpful for parents of Year Six children who are concerned about their children being ready to start Secondary School in September.

Gameschooling

Because it’s hands-on and game-based, it will follow naturally from your usual relationship of chatting and playing together. You don’t need to be a teacher to play educational games together. There is a lot of turn taking and collaboration in the Frogotter Activities. This will reduce conflict and pressure and help to make this time positive.

Fun Resources

All the equipment has been chosen to maximize fun and engagement. The wooden animals, magnetic letters and counters are all extremely appealing to children, encouraging them to join in and enjoy learning.

Short Activities

None of the individual activities take very long to complete. Obviously, if children are enjoying themselves they may play for an extended period. But, the activities are designed to allow you to use any ten minutes to make progress. This is really ideal for busy families and for children with short attention spans. You can get a preview of the activities by visiting our Youtube Channel.

Great Value

We’re very sympathetic to parents who need to get things sorted right now. The kit can be reused for siblings, which makes it fantastic value for money. All the equipment can be used time and again. Once your children do return to school, the kit will be brilliant to help with homework, and with reinforcing any concepts that your child needs a bit of extra practice with. We’re offering a special lockdown sale price of £99.60 including postage within the UK. We’ll keep this price until children can return to school.

Personal Support

We’re a home educating family, with four children of our own. We’ve been educating our children for years. We’re available on twitter, instagram and by email to help you with any queries, so you don’t need to feel like you’re on your own!

Tea towel with a picture of a time snail on it

Categories
Home Education

Sensory Play Throughout Primary School

Sensory Play is popular in Early Years settings, and amongst parents of toddlers. But fewer teachers or parents think of using it with older children. I think that’s a shame.

Engaging the senses helps us to encode memories. So, the more senses we use in learning, the easier it is to recall material.

The Frogotter Box is designed to encourage you and your child to use your senses as you learn. The hands-on materials engage touch as well as sight. There are games to engage senses of proprioception and of sound. The Extension Activities even include recipes to engage the senses of smell and taste.

Sensory Play is appealing. Laying out a selection of resources invites children to explore and learn. Everything about the Frogotter Box – from the treasure chest style of the box itself to the lovely tactile wooden animals and the soft time snail sheet – is designed to invite children to investigate.

Sensory Play is open-ended. Repeat is s key element of the Frogotter method, not because it’s about drilling information into children, but because returning to toys and games gives time and space for children to develop their ideas. The first time you try an activity, you may just follow the steps and your child might have few ideas to contribute. The second time, however, they will be ready to go further. If you repeat an activity a few times, your child will begin to play with the ideas themselves, and in play they will take their learning in new directions and to greater depths.

There are lots of online resources, and they certainly have their place. But, I think that learning a new concept is far easier when you can get your hands on it and move it around.

Categories
Home Education

My Biggest Home Education Mistakes

We’ve been home educating for a while now, but we still seem to be learning all the time. Here are the biggest mistakes we’ve made – so far!

Too Much Flash

When we first started home educating our oldest two children, we really wanted to ensure they enjoyed home education. So every lesson was an adventure! We entered competitions; we cooked feasts; we embarked on big craft projects; we played games. We didn’t want any lesson to be boring.

And, the boys hated it! They became very resistant to all these games and new activities. They struggled to remember anything we were trying to teach them. One day, when struggling to get the boys to take an interest in a lego-themed storytelling activity, frustration reached its peak. We were putting hours of work into planning these elaborate activities and the children just didn’t care!

So, we bought a couple of basic workbooks, we got a big jar of counters to help with maths, and we started cooking the same cake recipe every week. The change was remarkable. We were happier because prep was so much easier. The boys were happier because – without all the flashy distractions – they could actually follow lessons much more clearly and learn much more effectively. They even learnt how to bake that one cake recipe!

Far from boring them, routine and repetition made my children feel secure and made their world easier to understand.

Lesson learnt: sometimes simple is best.

Putting Home Educated Children into Year Groups

With four children of different ages, we know that not all of them are at the same level.

However, age is not the best guide to choosing an activity. We have bought loads of workbooks with ages printed on the front. Sometimes (particularly with English – which is a struggle for two of our children) books aimed at the correct age are far too hard.

The obvious solution was to buy the next age down. It was probably better suited to our children’s ability level. However, they hated the idea of being asked to do work ‘for younger children’ and we’re upset.

The best answer has been to find books with vague – or, even better, no – age rating! Naturally, there is no age-rating on the Frogotter Box!

Lesson learnt: children can be sensitive about the ‘right age’ for their school work.

Doing Everything Apart

One of the great joys of home education is tailoring the education to the individual child. So, obviously, we assumed that each child should have a separate plan: their own box of work, their own desk, their own timetable, individual time with a parent to talk about their lessons.

The children became absolutely fascinated with each others’ work! Every time we tried to help one child, they others would appear, looking over shoulders, offering comments, even (in the case of the toddler) snatching the books and running away with them!

We need a balance. Some activities have to be done alone – the toddler really can’t understand the teen’s algebra! But, it’s really fun to do some things together. And, when we can, it’s great to encourage the children to show off their work to one another. We’ve had a lot of fun doing experiments together, reading books together, watching plays together and playing games together.

Lesson learnt: Learning alongside someone else can be lots more fun than studying solo.

Over Scheduling

This is a mistake we’ve made more than once! There are so many fun groups to join and so many wonderful trips to go on. It’s all too easy to keep saying ‘yes’.

Parkour? Yes! Swimming? Yes! Climbing? Yes! Co-op? Yes, please! Nature Walk? Yes! Natural History Museum? Yes!

The problem is, that we end up with grouchy, tired children, and a house that manages to be an absolute tip even though we never seem to be in it!

When trips are too frequent, they stop feeling like a treat. Having dragged frazzled, moody children around a soft play park and lunch out, I felt frustrated that I’d wasted money and nobody had enjoyed themselves. It turns out that treats are only special if they’re rare! It’s not a treat if it happens all the time.

Now we make sure that – however brilliant the offers are – we have one ‘catch-up day’ a week. A day at home to finish projects and get a bit of housework done. We enjoy our trips far more now that we have enthusiasm for them. We simply can’t go everywhere or see everything. But, realising that helps us to value the things that we do even more.

Lesson learnt: There’s a no end of fun things to do, but there is an end to our supply of energy.